Planning is key to successful migration. Before you upgrade to a new version of Informix, review the Migration Guide to ensure that you understand the migration process, prerequisites, and reversion options. The "Preparing for Migration" section of the guide contains information about how to prepare your database server environment for migration.

After you migrate to the new version, you should also take time to plan for using the features included in the new server version. The "Completing required post-migration tasks" section of the Migration Guide contains information on the post-migration tasks you should complete to prepare the new version of the server for use. You should also view the lists of new and changed configuration parameters, new environment variables, new keywords of SQL, and new system databases that are in the Migration Guide.

Because I write the IBM® Informix® TimeSeries Data User's Guide, I was lucky enough to be able to read this benchmark as it was being written. It truly is amazing! Check out how fast and efficient the Informix TimeSeries solution is for meter data management.

Are you familiar with IBM® Informix® Warehouse Accelerator, which comes with the IBM Informix Ultimate Warehouse Edition? If not, check out the two video demos that were recently announced on the Informix Warehouse Accelerator blog.

Ever wonder what to do when you got a severity 4 event alarm? For IBM® Informix® 11.50.xC9, we added descriptions, server states, and user actions for severity 4 and 5 event alarms to the Administrator's Reference.

Look for the descriptions of the severity 4 and 5 event alarms here. (You'll have to scroll down a bit to get to the first severity 4 alarm description.) You can see all severity 5 alarms here. Event alarms specific to Enterprise Replication are here.

If you upgrade to either version 11.70xC3 or 11.50xC9 of IBM Informix, you can:

Configure the actions that the server takes to continue processing when memory is critically low. You can specify the criteria for terminating sessions based on idle time, memory usage, and other factors so that the targeted application can continue and avoid out-of-memory problems. Configuring the low memory response is useful for embedded applications that have memory limitations.

Reserve memory for use when critical activities (such as rollback activities) are needed and the server has limited free memory. If you reserve memory, the critical activities can complete even when you get out-of-memory errors.